All language subtitles for Expert.Witness.S03E02.A.Watery.Grave.and.the.Dangerous.Date.1080p.WEBRip.x264-CBFM[EZTVx.to]

When a serious crime is committed and
the police need all the help they can

get, there's one group of people they
turn to time after time.

The expert witnesses.

Knowing when someone's done something is
one thing, but proving it's completely

different. We need that last piece of
the jigsaw.

An extraordinary army of men and women
with the expertise to reveal the hidden

clues criminals have left behind.

It might be a fingerprint, footwear
mark, cell site analysis that can come

up with that golden ticket to put that
investigation on a different path.

Using the very latest techniques.

Several months or even years later,
evidence can remain and still be

recovered.

This is the inside story of how science
helps solve some of the UK's most

complex cases.

The forensics in this case.

showed us what did happen. Not what
could have happened, what did happen.

If you've been in a scene, it's
virtually impossible to clean everything

up. Something is going to be there. If
we're looking in the right place, we'll

find it.

Without the unseen hero painstakingly
going through forensic, I might not have

got justice for my daughter.

This is the story of the expert witness.

In this programme, an expert witness
examines a muddy crime scene to

determine how a body got there.

He was standing up, straight up, and he
was just bent at the waist.

That in itself is interesting.

And when police investigate a number of
complaints against the young man... My

gut instinct did say that there was
something up with him, something wrong,

but unfortunately I ignored my gut
instinct and led to regret.

A virologist is brought in to reveal if
the suspect was guilty.

Where you have a transmission, you can
see a resemblance between the strains

infecting the two parties.

And it was really that type of linkage
that would substantiate the allegations

that were made.

Expert witnesses helped investigations
by seeing the clues the rest of us

can't. When the body of an elderly
farmer was found in a river, it wasn't

clear to detectives whether it was a
case of suicide or murder. But a

bioarchaeologist was able to detect and
decipher evidence left at the crime

scene.

Forensic bioarchaeology can help
criminal investigation by interpreting

the crime scene. Sometimes the
environment can give as much evidence as

the body itself, sometimes more.

June 2018, Gosmore in Hertfordshire.

69-year-old farmer Bill Taylor is
reported missing from his home by his

family.

Reporting on the case for the national
newspapers at the time was Thomas

Hornell. Gosmore is a small hamlet and
most of the farmland there was actually

owned by the Taylors. There was hundreds
of acres.

Dozens of police ended up showing up and
combing through every blade of grass on

Bill's farmland, searching for him. This
was a really big police presence for a

normally sleepy town.

Due to the sheer scale and complexity of
the search, the Hertfordshire Police

Major Crime Unit were called in to
organise the hunt for Bill. This was

certainly the largest search that I've
ever been involved in and coordinated.

While search teams scoured the
countryside, Detective Chief Inspector

Carl Foster turned to Bill's family and
friends.

They revealed his personal life was
complicated.

Estranged from his second wife,
Angela...

and with his family at war.

Whilst Bill and Angela were separated,
they weren't yet divorced.

Angela wanted to get divorced. Bill was
effectively digging his heels in and

saying, no, I don't want to do that.

Both Bill and Angela had children from
previous marriages and they had three

children together and in particular
Bill's son from his first marriage did

not get on with Angela and her side of
the family at all. In fact, they

completely loathed each other.

Bill was kind of stuck in the middle
because Bill obviously loved both sides

of the family. He had children and
grandchildren in both sides of the

family and he was stuck between a rock
and a hard place.

Although police had no body with which
to reveal a definitive cause of death,

they began to suspect foul play from
within the feuding family.

The police were suspicious of Angela
because she didn't seem that moved or

distressed by Bill's disappearance and
detectives also overheard her talking

about him in the past tense.

However, detectives could not identify
an obvious motive for why Angela would

have wanted her husband dead.

There was already a post-nuptial
agreement in place between Bill and

Angela where they'd already agreed on
the allocation of property and land

worth anything from £150 to £200
million.

The title deeds had already been moved
over to Angela as part of that

agreement, so that effectively, for me,
said...

Well, it can't be a financial motive
here, then.

But one discovery left detectives
convinced someone in Bill's circle held

a serious grudge against him.

One of the issues that concerned us was
the fact that his vehicle had been

subject to an arson attack the week
prior to him going missing. It had been

attended by officers, Anderson's crime
officer. The towel, the shirt and the

fuel can that were found in the Land
Rover didn't belong to Bill. We sent all

of those off.

for forensic examination to establish
whether there was any forensic evidence

that would assist us.

Detectives continued their
investigations, this time into Angela's

personal life, and identified someone
who raised their suspicions.

The police began to look at a man named
Paul Cannon, who was a digger driver who

had done some work on Bill's farm and
was around a lot at Angela's place. So

they really began to look at those two,
suspecting a relationship.

Angela admitted she was having an affair
with Paul Cannon.

And when lab results returned from the
items in the burnt-out Land Rover, they

showed traces of Cannon's DNA.

Significant, but not enough to prove he
was responsible for Bill's

disappearance. What the forensic
evidence against Paul Cannon did was

obviously elevate our concerns around
what was going on between him and Bill,

potentially Angela, and that whole
family dynamic.

But on its own, does it explain what has
then happened to Bill a week later?

No, it doesn't.

Nonetheless, Hertfordshire Police
declared the case a murder inquiry.

Without the body, they didn't have
enough evidence to charge either Angela

Taylor or Paul Cannon of any wrongdoing.

But their investigation was far from
over.

We became aware that Paul Cannon had
been employed at two quarry sites, both

within the county of Hertfordshire.

Whilst the two sites had been shut
down...

If Bill has been murdered, could his
body have been secreted in either one of

those quarries?

Any disused quarry is a hazardous
environment.

These two were huge.

Concerned about the risk to police
search teams, Carl turned to

bioarchaeologist Jennifer Miller for
advice.

I have a lot of experience of searching
landfills for a missing person and

recovery of bodies buried within
landfills. So I was asked to advise what

the logistics would be for recovery of
anything from this sort of environment.

We walked over the quarries and they're
both over an acre. They're between 20

and 30 metres high mounds of industrial
waste and it's very, very unstable.

Very, very dangerous. Potential for
collapse and it would have taken months,

if not years, to search it all. And
without substantiated evidence to say

that he was in there, then it's not
worth doing.

DCI Carl Foster took Jenny's advice and
decided against excavating the quarry.

Searching for more concrete evidence
that Bill was murdered, he examined

mobile phones belonging to Paul Cannon
and Angela Taylor.

They contained 28,000 text messages sent
between the pair in the four months

before Bill's disappearance.

The contents were shocking.

So this is just a small extract from the
thousands of messages between Paul

Cannon and Angela Taylor.

It starts with Paul Cannon, got to get
him out of the picture very soon,

darling. And she replies, I don't know
how to sort it, someone else maybe.

And Paul Cannon replies to the effect, I
only know one man for that and I haven't

spoken to him in a long time, but I'll
try.

The following day, the 17th of February,
you phone that bloke, can't keep going

on like this. And Cannon replies, I'm
good, darling, just spoke to a man going

to be about 20.

To which he replies, I'll go hard with
you.

Messages closer to the time of Bill's
disappearance were even more chilling.

26th May was the night Bill's Land Rover
was subject to the arson attack.

And you've got a conversation here where
Paul says, have to go to Dog Kennel, get

something. Dog Kennel is the name of one
of the farms that Angela owned.

Angela replies, what you got to get? And
then Paul Cannon replies, darling, you

light my fire.

But both Paul Cannon and Angela Taylor
refused to make any comments on the

significance of these text messages.

Why did you make the comment, light my
fire? Or did he say it to you?

Because neither of you have said it to
each other ever before.

It can't be a coincidence that night the
Land Rover gets set on fire, can it?

No comment.

Bill was last seen alive around 9.30 by
his grandson and then some two hours

later, Paul Cannon sends a message to
Angela Taylor saying, just watching Kill

Bill 2, laugh out loud, which is pretty
sinister when you know the timeline and

the sequence of events and then you read
that message.

The messages also contained violent
sexual fantasies centred around

punishing Bill.

But tellingly, they all stopped the day
Bill disappeared.

There's no more talk of, you know,
getting rid of Bill, killing Bill,

making love while the blood's running
down the drain.

None of that.

Why is that?

Why has it stopped on the 4th of June?

The recovery of these messages...

was a huge leap forward in the
investigation.

I would describe those messages as a
black and white transcript of a

conspiracy to murder Bill.

Angela Taylor and Paul Cannon were both
charged with murder.

But Bill's body was yet to be found. The
case against the pair was far from

watertight. We were preparing for the
no-body trial.

The defence would exploit that and
suggest that he's potentially taken

himself off, he might have a girlfriend
somewhere, he's had enough and he's

walked out of his life.

Then, in February 2019, eight months
after Bill Taylor disappeared, a chance

discovery gave detectives a massive
breakthrough.

Bill's remains were found by a fisherman
who wanted to get the perfect spot, so

he'd actually gone onto private land
owned by Angela.

and discovered the remains of Bill
Taylor by the riverbank.

The body offered detectives an entirely
new set of clues which could reveal for

the first time how Bill Taylor died.

We knew we were going to need to
demonstrate that Bill hadn't gone there

to take his own life and he hadn't gone
there and been victim of some form of

medical episode or accident.

DCI Carl Foster needed a thorough
forensic analysis of the body and the

riverbank where it was found.

So he turned again to expert witness
Jennifer Miller.

My remit was primarily to recover the
body and interpret events at the scene,

so how the body had got into the river
as best as possible.

The mud was just short of a metre deep.
All you could see was the head just at

the banking and the back, which was
covered in algae, and there was nothing

else visible. So it was face down in the
mud.

The first thing to do is try to
understand how the body is lying, so the

disposition of the remains, as it's
called.

We're able to identify quite quickly
that although he was lying face down, he

was actually standing up and he was just
bent at the waist.

So that in itself is interesting.

It's an unusual way to be in.

This unusual position made Jennifer
doubt that Bill had become stuck in the

deep mud on his own.

The positioning of the body was such
that both feet were facing the bank.

It would be very difficult to walk in
backwards through that thick mud without

losing your balance and falling
backwards rather than forwards, and

perhaps that's the key point. As you
lift your leg to go forwards, you're

more likely to overbalance backwards
than you are forwards.

It's more suggestive of being laid
there, being put over somebody's

shoulder and with the feet facing
forwards and deposited.

What's more, Jennifer concluded Bill may
well have already been dead by the time

he was placed in the river.

I think it's unlikely that he was put in
there alive and effectively kicking

because he didn't kick. The feet were
together, the knees were together, his

thighs were together. He was bolt
upright and it's very unlikely, in my

opinion, that he was conscious when this
happened.

Under Jennifer's supervision, Bill's
body was carefully recovered from the

mud and sent for post-mortem.

That revealed injuries to his neck,
consistent with strangulation.

The case against Angela Taylor and Paul
Cannon was now as strong as it could be.

Their trial began in September 2019, and
Jennifer's evidence was crucial.

At the trial, the defence were quite
robust in their questioning. They

insisted that he had potentially walked
in and asked me to say if this was

possible. And I did explain to them that
having never taken a body into the mire,

I don't know. But I'm quite convinced,
in my own opinion, that had he walked

into the mire, then the disposition of
the remains would have been very

different.

Jen was really important around the
interpretation of that deposition site.

Her evidence was absolutely solid and,
yeah, couldn't ask for more, really.

They talked of torturing him in text
messages, discussed the cost of hiring a

hitman, and today they were found guilty
of his murder. A jury has decided that

wealthy farmer Bill Taylor was killed by
his wife and her lover for refusing her

a divorce.

duplicitous and calculating and plainly
besotted.

That was the judge's assessment today of
lovers Angela Taylor and Paul Cannon as

they were each sentenced to 21 years in
prison for the murder of William Taylor.

What a pointless, pointless exercise.

The old fashion, like just removing a
love rival, but it just seems so

unnecessary, you know, to murder an old
man

However unusual the crime, there's a
science that can help solve it. In this

next case, dozens of victims and a
national manhunt led police to the

suspect in a one-of-a-kind criminal
investigation.

But in order to secure a conviction,
police needed the expertise of a

virologist, an expert in viruses.

My main interest has been in the field
of the evolution of viruses, how they

change over time. And I think that's
obviously something that we're all very

aware of with the COVID pandemic.

Edinburgh 2015, where a shocking crime
is unfolding, one that will span the UK,

affect dozens of gay men and end in a
dramatic national manhunt.

It started with one man, 26-year-old
Daryl Rowe, and one of his victims,

Stuart Roger.

I came across Daryl Rowe through an app
called Grindr.

which is a sort of dating hook-up app, a
bit akin to Tinder.

I agreed to meet up with Daryl, and
during that encounter, he appeared to

tamper or sabotage the condom, which I
had insisted on being used.

And at the time, I just wrote off as me
over-worrying about something.

I kind of felt quite grossy after the
encounter with Daryl, and, you know, the

truth was there was a very dark
atmosphere around him, which was

unmistakable.

My gut instinct did say that there was
something up with him and that there was

something wrong, but unfortunately I
ignored my gut instinct and lived to

regret that.

Stuart seemed to think that something
was wrong, but confirmed within days

when he received a string of sinister
text messages from Roe.

About eight days later, after the
encounter, he sent me a series of

abusive messages, revealing to me that
he had indeed sabotaged the condom,

along with a series of other insults and
taunts.

I felt an enormous sense of alarm and
disturbance when I got those messages.

And I knew that because he had subdued
the condom, I was at risk of contracting

something. So I arranged a HIV test as
soon as I possibly could.

A couple of weeks after that, I sadly
got the phone call from the clinic

asking me to come in that day and
telling me that I was HIV positive. And

I knew that it was definitely him.

I did contact the police, I think,
within about a week of my diagnosis.

You know, I was determined to get
justice and I gave a full statement

about what had happened and told them
that this man had violated my consent

and showed them the screen grabs of the
messages that he had sent me.

Police Scotland moved to arrest Abel
Rowe, but he had fled.

Detectives searched for him and were
astonished when he turned up 500 miles

away in Brighton.

Here he was deliberately infecting more
men with HIV.

BBC journalist Carol Erskine reported on
the case.

In Brighton, another one of his victims
had found out he had tested positive for

HIV. He had gone to a clinic to be
tested and while he was there he had

shown text messages that Daryl Rowe had
sent him, these terrible, horrible

messages that he had sent him to staff
at the clinic.

And they then realised that they had
seen other men in the clinic who'd had

similar messages.

Police now suspected they were dealing
with a serial offender who had left

behind 14 victims in Edinburgh and now
eight new victims in Brighton.

Sussex police caught up with Daryl Rowe
and he was arrested on a charge of GBH.

But Rowe denied all the charges and
under questioning, he claimed he was not

even HIV positive.

Do you have HIV?

No.

Have you had a HIV test recently?

Not recently.

I had a relationship when I first got
here and it was unprotected.

So I've not been tested after that.

Okay. So you're saying a couple of
months ago you had a relationship, had

unprotected sex?

When I first got here.

I was dating somebody pretty quickly and
got quite intense.

Darryl Rowe was bailed in Brighton to
return to his foster parents in

Scotland. It was after three weeks of
living with them that he went on the run

and was missing.

Detectives were convinced Rowe would
offend again.

They shared his image with the media and
a national manhunt swung into action.

Police found his tent in the Pentland
Hills and they were able to identify it

as being his because it had his
medication inside.

But for months there was no sign of Roe
until one man saw Roe's image and had a

chilling realisation.

He was living in Newcastle with a man
who believed he was in a relationship

with him and had no idea of his previous
history.

Roe had changed his name and bank
details but continued with his prolific

crime spree infecting even more victims
with HIV.

The nationwide manhunt to find him
uncovered further victims and he was

actually discovered on a dating website
when police were able to compare

pictures of his genitalia and discover
that this is the man that they were

looking for.

After a joint operation by Northumbria,
Scotland and Sussex Police Forces, Roe

was finally arrested in North Tyneside.

But he claimed that his accusers could
have caught HIV from anyone.

Detectives needed to prove that the
infection could only have come from Roe.

So they turned to an expert witness,
Peter Simmons, Professor of Virology at

the University of Oxford.

We were provided with blood samples from
Roe and several alleged victims of him.

We separated white cells from those.

Within white cells, there'll be copies
of HIV, often very low numbers, but we

will then amplify those up to an extent,
which means we can then directly

determine their genetic sequence and
analyze them for linkage.

evolves very quickly so it's not just
one strain there are literally hundreds

of thousands of different strains where
you have a transmission of hiv then you

can see a resemblance between the
strains infecting the two parties and it

was really that type of linkage that
we're looking for to substantiate the

allegations that were made we conduct
what we call phylogenetic analysis that

will show whether these strains cluster
together

or whether they're unrelated to each
other.

Well, if we find a strong clustering of
strains, and in fact in this case we

did, what this shows effectively is they
share a similar or common strain of HIV,

and that would generally be acquired
through transmission between them.

Having concluded a strain of HIV was
common among Rowe and his victims,

Professor Simmons now had to recheck his
results and run the analysis a second

time. We were provided with a second set
of samples.

And the idea of that was to show that we
reproducibly got the same strains from

the individuals in a different set of
samples. That was actually what the

defence expert would demand that we
provide as evidence.

In 2018, Dabble Rowe was tried at courts
in both England and Scotland.

He was charged with causing grievous
bodily harm with intent to infect HIV.

He became the first man in the country
to be found guilty of intentionally

trying to spread the virus.

When we were in court, I saw him in the
flesh for the first time since the

incident, and that was very
nerve-wracking.

It was kind of a vindication to see him
cut down to size, and he was a much more

belittled and humble figure sitting
there in the dock.

I went to court and had to testify to
the judge and jury.

Finding such a strong cluster in such a
large number of people was actually key

to the certainty that Roe was involved
in this. And I think the genetic

evidence was very well understood by the
jury and probably influenced their

decision that he was guilty.

Roe was sentenced to 12 years in
England.

And in Scotland, he was given eight
years and placed on the Sex Offenders

Register.

I felt a huge amount of relief, most of
all.

Sadly, a lot of victims of sexual
violence don't get justice, and I was

very lucky in that respect. And
actually, that's a credit to the

professionalism of everybody involved on
the case.

Peter Simmons' work was crucial in
convicting Daryl because it helped us

get to the point where it could be
proved beyond reasonable doubt that it

had been transmitted from him to me.

Without a virology finding, the
prosecution would rely on the fact that

there was a consistent contact history
between Roe and the individuals

concerned.

So having the genetic evidence was
certainly very important in showing the

linkage between HIV strains.

within the various parties involved.

Two very different cases there, but both
needing the extraordinary skills of

expert witnesses to dig beneath the
surface and help detectives uncover the

truth and bring those responsible to
justice.